User blog:Willbachbakal/(Champion Rework) Rumble, the Mechanized Menace
This is a tentative rework for Rumble, the Mechanized Menace. While Rumble's sometimes surfaced as a slightly overbearing top lane bully, he's mostly harmless now, and has a pretty fun core playstyle that has attracted quite a few players, many of which have even expanded him to the jungle. So what's wrong with him? Nothing too serious, but for one, I kinda feel he doesn't fulfill his fantasy to the fullest extent: originally designed to be this jumpy, spammy bruiser-mage caster, with a focus on resource management over cooldowns, Rumble often doesn't really play into that system when he should be, overheating in all-ins and exerting a ton of power when he should be at his most vulnerable. This, in turn, has led to him receiving a stream of nerfs over time whenever he got a bit too strong in lane, often leading to changes that left him unsatisfying to play, such as the recently reverted damage reduction on his Q against minions. To a certain extent, his unique resource isn't really implemented in a manner that allows him to micromanage it even if he wanted to, as he often has no choice but to either overheat or wait an exceedingly long amount of time to avoid doing so, which eventually amounts to the same thing. Those of you who have seen my other attempts at reworking champions on paper know that I often min-max their power in their extreme, and this is no different: the intent with these changes is to shift Rumble's focus completely on his resource and away from his cooldowns, by effectively giving his basic abilities no cooldowns at all and balancing from there. The other goal here is to move Rumble slightly away from being a battle mage, and more towards him being the game's foremost area denial juggernaut: as a close-range, durable damage-dealer based around personal combat boosts, Rumble typically comes across as a bruiser, albeit of more mage-y kind, and it's mostly the range on some of his abilities that puts him halfway between juggernaut and battle mage territory (it's also what often leads to him becoming too much of a bully in lane). One of the main changes here is a major buff to the consistency of his threat, at a cost to its range. Abilities Rumble cannot use basic attacks, but instead constantly spews a stream of flames from his mech's flamethrower, dealing (2 level)}} magic damage per seconds| (8 level)}} magic damage per second}} in a cone in front of him, capable of damaging structures. Ability-inhibiting crowd control disables Flamespitter. |range=375 |targeting='Junkyard Juggernaut' is composed of two separate effects: *'Flamespitter' is a persistent conic area of effect ability. *'Heat' is both a self-buff and self-debuff. |spellshield=will not block the ability |additional=For those of you who know me, it should come as no surprise that I'd want to shift all of the damage in Rumble's kit into his passive. However, here I think there's an extra-special reason, and it's his resource management: on live, Rumble has essentially no reason to not use his Q in any fight, and in fact failing to do so would seriously limit his effectiveness. Because of this, he can't really manage his resource as much as he'd want to, because it's generally always better to press Q if it's off cooldown no matter how much Heat he has. The early drops in DPS are also the only real mitigating factor to his jungling power, and in every situation but laning his Q basically carries no real decision. Moving it here essentially cuts out the middle man and lets him output constant DPS while focusing on more interesting choices, e.g. how to boost his power within the next second or two, and whether or not to do it. Adding to this is a set of larger changes, the main one being the switch from Heat to energy: ultimately, the two resources boil down to one and the same, and I thought I'd demonstrate that by showing that Rumble can work on an energy model and retain the same controlled spam playstyle. The other changes are to his range, fighting style and speed: I've reduced Flamespitter's range quite substantially, to 375 from 600, reduced his movement speed down to 325 from 345, increased his base health and health growth to 606 and 82 from 584.4 and 80, respectively, and completely removed his ability to use basic attacks, with corresponding removals of some of his base stats, namely attack damage, attack speed and attack range. The idea behind the range and speed reduction, as well as the health increase, is to move Rumble into juggernaut space, and allow his other abilities (in particular, his movespeed boost and slow) to feel a lot stronger by comparison, and the thought process behind the removal of his basic attacks is that his Flamespitter is his basic attack, for all intents and purposes, and has the damage and general gameplay to match. }} Rumble activates his mech's boosters, propelling himself forward with bonus movement speed but a reduced turn rate. |leveling= |cost=20 |costtype=energy per second |targeting='Jet Boosters' is a self-buff. |additional=I'm splitting Rumble's Scrap Shield into two components, mainly because they're both interesting in their own right. The general idea behind Rumble's new basic ability set is that he gets to use as much of any ability as he wants, whenever he wants, though his total number of casts is limited within a given timeframe. In this particular case, he should be able to choose between a sweet movement speed bonus and tankiness in varying amounts, especially since those two bonuses tend to have very different use cases and applications in combat. Those of you familiar with Overwatch or Heroes of the Storm will also notice that this is, in a way, a rip of D.va's Boosters: aside from the immediate similarity between two mech-based champions, I thought giving Rumble genuine thrusters, plus a turn speed, would be much more interesting for both him and his opponents. On one hand, physically pushing oneself into a direction would feel much more kinetic than just timed bonus movement speed, plus the turn speed would allow the boost to be stronger overall, and on the other, that same turn speed means enemies have a means to sidestep Rumble and impending doom via flamethrower, and play around the ability in such a way that he can over- or undershoot, and commit to a specific direction. This gives Rumble an edge in that he'd be one of the more mobile juggernauts, and situationally the most mobile, though all of this comes at a significant tradeoff in other options and overall power over time. }} Rumble shields himself for 1 second |leveling= maximum health}} |cost=20 |costtype=energy |targeting='Scrap Shield' is a self-buff. |additional=This is just about your bog-standard shield, with a twist in its spammability and stacking mechanic: the idea here is that Rumble gets to stack his shield as much as he wants, since he can ultimately only stack it up to five times. Using it pre-emptively to mitigate burst versus using it more consistently to weather incoming attacks would be one of the ways Rumble would have to decide upon his ability use. This is also why the initial shield gets to stack up to stronger values than on live: it's meant to be really good at reactively blocking damage, and when stacked can provide a huge buffer to Rumble's health, just as spacing it out can make him more resistant to DPS, but ultimately, you get fewer basic ability casts in a short period of time than you do on live, so when you activate Scrap Shield here, you're activating it purely for the shield, and in doing so are sacrificing much more access to his other boosts. }} Rumble fires a harpoon that the first enemy it hits for 1 second. |leveling= |range=750 |speed=2000 |cost=20 |costtype=energy |targeting='Electro-Harpoon' is a linear colliding skill shot. |spellshield=will block the ability. |additional=This is, overall, a nerf to Electro-Harpoon's power per individual cast, since the ability no longer deals damage, slows for half the duration, has a shorter range (750 from 850), costs twice as much and no longer stacks, even if the base slow is stronger. However, the ability also has a fairly large buff in that it no longer has a cooldown, meaning that, if you wanted to fully devote your power towards CC (all of Rumble's basic abilities are either CC or some kind of utility), then you'd be able to slow a target for a full 5 seconds, or multiple targets concurrently. Overall, this is still a bit of a nerf to Rumble's overall crowd control, sticking power and long-distance last hitting, but one compensated for by situationally increased crowd control and overall better close-range fighting power. One thing this also helps with is clarity: since individual E casts are no longer charges or double-casts or whatnot, and are therefore completely unusable while at his limit, Rumble's windows of threat and vulnerability are a lot clearer for him and his opponent, so no sneaky harpoons breaking through what's generally meant to be a self-silence. }} Rumble calls down a line of rockets down which remains for the next 5 seconds, dealing magic damage every seconds to all enemies within. |leveling= | }} |range=1700 |cooldown= |targeting='The Equalizer' is a vector-targeted, linear skill shot. |spellshield=will not block the ability. |additional=Keeping Rumble's ult mostly as is, since it's a pretty fine ability. The only changes here are an adjustment to his base damage (more at rank 1, less at rank 3) and an increase to its AP scaling. The change to the base damage is there mostly to make for cleaner per-quarter-second damage, but also to give Rumble a stronger level 6 spike, as he'd otherwise have fewer kit-based power spikes. The reduced base damage at ranks 2-3 and inscreased AP scaling are there to push Rumble to scale with AP (and scale well) despite it factoring into only one other ability. In a push to remove non-essential CC, I'm taking out the slow on Rumble's ult. }} What are your thoughts on this? Would a direction like this appeal to you for Rumble or possibly another champion? What do you think of a cooldown-less champion? Category:Custom champions